A ‘good news only’ culture masked a ‘shocking lack of
financial control’ of the government’s Universal Credit programme, as it
emerged £140 million has been wasted on IT systems that cannot be used. This is
the damning view of a cross-party committee, which slammed the DWP for
‘extraordinarily poor management’ over the flagship welfare reform which rolls
several benefits into one single payment made direct to claimants. The report says £140 million spent on IT
assets will have to be written off, as they are unsuitable for use in the
programme. A DWP spokesperson said it expects this to be substantially lower.
Control over suppliers was ‘shocking’, with personal assistants signing off on
multi-million purchase orders and individual payments that could not be linked
to work delivered, the committee claimed. Download a copy of the report from the
Parliament website.
No comments:
Post a Comment